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In April The Believer<\/em> declared Nora Ephron \u201cthe original Tina Fey.\u201d This week, an\u00a0obituary<\/a> on The Daily Beast<\/em> said that she was bigger than Twain. Both superlatives gloss over the fact that Ephron\u2019s work was widely reviled (a Village Voice<\/em> review of Bewitched<\/em> even argued that \u201cthe Ephrons should have to sharecrop, for all the good they’ve done for the culture\u201d) and that, even for Ephron devotees, part of the charm of seeing her latest flick was wondering whether it\u2019d be typical Burbank dung (Mixed Nuts<\/em>! Michael<\/em>!) or a piece of deathless Hollywood legend.<\/p>\n Ephron kept dice in her purse, was willing to \u201cteach almost anyone how to play craps at a moment\u2019s notice,\u201d and her writing had a gambler\u2019s unevenness. The rambling digressiveness, along with the faint datedness, of her worldview only intensified your shock when Ephron arrived, seemingly by accident, at an incisive thought. Here she is in her 1983 roman \u00e0 clef Heartburn<\/em>, recounting a speech she often made while preparing Lillian Hellman\u2019s pot roast recipe:<\/p>\n I have no problem with her political persona, or with her insistence on making herself the centerpiece of most of the historical conflicts of the twentieth century; but it seems to me that she invented a romantic fantasy about her involvement with Dashiell Hammett that is every bit as unrealistic as the Doris Day movies feminists prefer to blame for society\u2019s unrealistic notions about romance \u2026 it occurred to me as I delivered [the speech] yet another time that I had always zipped through that part of the speech as if I had somehow managed to be invulnerable to the fantasy, as if I had somehow managed to escape from or rise above it simply as a result of having figured it out. I think you often have that sense when you write\u2014that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you\u2019re free of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As someone who was corn-fed on her movies as a child, the passage seems eerily prophetic. Seeing Ephron gab about \u201cunrealistic notions about romance\u201d in 1983 is rather like hearing those reports that the young L. Ron Hubbard told friends, \u201cIf you want to get rich, you start a religion\u201d\u2014and it hints at the nagging contradictions of Nora Ephron\u2019s life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1993, Ephron scoffed when a Rolling Stone<\/em> reporter suggested that she might gain a reputation as \u201csome queen of romance.\u201d Now it\u2019s her undisputed legacy: When Harry Met Sally<\/em>, Sleepless in Seattle<\/em>, and You\u2019ve Got Mail<\/em> (the last of which Nora cowrote with her sister, Delia) have become little Bibles of love for my generation. They are starter romantic comedies\u2014dense with children in bowl cuts, plots that bunny-hop from holiday to holiday, and sound tracks that plumb the depths of the American songbook without ever including a lyric about physical proximity. They were mercilessly effective propaganda films; Ephron herself complained about \u201cthe number of kids who come up to me, saying, I\u2019m in this kind of Harry Met Sally<\/em> situation, and I\u2019m sort of hoping that\u2014. I want to say to them, It\u2019s probably not gonna work!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In recent years, her command of romantic-comedy formula had grown so effortless that Ephron herself seemed unable to shake it off. In essays\u00a0about apartment hunting<\/a>, Hellman, and journalism<\/a>, Ephron shoehorned each into the structure of a romance. On the first: \u201cIt\u2019s a story about love\u201d. On the second: \u201cThe story of love\u201d. The third is actually called \u201cJournalism: A Love Story.\u201d This isn\u2019t writing; it\u2019s brand upkeep.<\/p>\n Of course, the impulse to refashion her peculiar impulses into a glossy commercial product was the defining tic of Ephron\u2019s career. In interview after interview, she flogged the fact that her screenwriter mother taught her to manipulate her experiences: \u201cIf you came to her with a sad story, she had no interest in it whatsoever. \u2018Turn it into a funny story. Get back to me. I will be interested.\u2019\u201d But Ephron didn\u2019t really turn her experiences into \u201cfunny stories\u201d; she mainstreamed them, made them frothy and palatable.<\/p>\n In 1990, Ephron dove at the opportunity to write a movie version of the Archie<\/em> comics, telling the producers, \u201cI\u2019ve been waiting all my life.\u201d It\u2019s one of the most revealing things she\u2019s ever done\u2014for Ephron would have found a kindred spirit in Archie<\/em> creator Bob Montana. Montana had a madcap showbiz childhood (his mother was a Ziegfeld girl; his father, a cowboy banjoist), and he reportedly engineered Archie<\/em>‘s cornball love triangle out of a deep-seated desire for stability. Ephron was the child of Henry and Phoebe Ephron; the couple wrote films for Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn and once rather decadently took separate \u201chis and hers\u201d cabs home from a San Francisco party. Her mother eventually descended into alcoholism, and her father into manic depression. When Phoebe Ephron died in 1971, from an overdose of pills administered by Henry, Nora remembers it being \u201ca moment of almost comic relief. It seemed entirely possible, in character, understandable, and I think we all filed it under Will I Ever Be Able to Use This in Anything?\u201d\u00a0She came close to using it: at one point in the semiautobiographical film Hanging Up<\/em>, a Nora stand-in pretends that her mother has died. But Ephron\u2014perhaps fearing that audiences would find her actual response to death callous\u2014didn\u2019t draw on her experience. Instead, the scene is played straight, with schlocky strings and a tactfully swiveling camera.<\/p>\n All of Ephron\u2019s post-1989 work was marked by a seeming reluctance to present us with who she really was. In her 1970s heyday at Esquire <\/em>and New York <\/em> she was capable of ruthless reportage\u2014from Israeli war coverage to an enthrallingly authoritative piece<\/a> on the rise of the food-writing establishment\u2014but in her last book, the 2010 essay collection I Remember Nothing<\/em>, she professed to a sub-bimbo daffiness, writing, \u201cI can\u2019t remember which came first\u2014wanting to be a journalist or wanting to date a journalist.\u201d In Heartburn<\/em>, Ephron presents herself as a compulsive renovator; by Sleepless<\/em>, she\u2019d fobbed that trait off on a narcissistic matron. In 1984, Ephron wrote that the invention of VCRs was a fallacy because \u201cthe whole point of going out is to miss what\u2019s on television\u201d; by You\u2019ve Got Mail<\/em>, she\u2019d given the same line to a pretentious, hypocritical columnist. It\u2019s as if Ephron focus-grouped her own personality and discovered she was unlikable.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But Ephron\u2019s best movies are also about the populist impulse, the urge to attain one moment of blissful overlap with romanticized Hollywood ideals. When Meg Ryan\u2019s jilted boyfriend in You\u2019ve Got Mail <\/em>asks if there\u2019s someone else, she replies, \u201cNo.\u00a0But there\u2019s the dream of someone else.\u201d I\u2019ve never gotten over that line. How hateful, I think,\u00a0and how applicable.\u00a0I\u2019ve wanted to say it to so many people (boyfriends, friends, immediate family members) but haven\u2019t been able to pluck up the courage. Ephron\u2019s characters are constantly forsaking reality in favor of pop-culture-dispensed dreams. The leads in her movies slavishly imitate their idols\u2014from Julia Child to Deborah Kerr to Samantha Stevens\u2014without realizing that they\u2019re more complicated and charming than their role models (the one exception, of course, is Julie Powell: she is an irredeemable dud). Ephron heroines are frenzied, interesting people desperate to couple off so that they no longer have to be interesting. At the end of both Sleepless<\/em> and Mail<\/em>, Ephron\u2019s characters suddenly seem to regress; their dialogue goes monosyllabic. It\u2019s a bizarre drop-off, especially compared to Billy Wilder or Lubitsch movies, in which love always heightened the comedy: your love for someone manifested as an incentive to be funnier, to win your quarry over with a bouquet of prickly punch lines. In the waning minutes of Ephron\u2019s movies, you feel that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are never going to make jokes, or be in conflict, ever again.<\/p>\n A few years ago Ephron said, \u201cThe really great thing about my life is that for the last thirty years it has had no plot.\u201d As a storyteller, did she honestly believe this?\u00a0When she became involved in the most minor of dry cleaner altercations, didn\u2019t she have that sensation described by novelist Shelley Jackson: \u201cI felt the tug of a plot line, and it felt like coming back to life\u201d? Ephron felt it once.\u00a0In Heartburn<\/em>, she wrote about the tedium of happiness: \u201cIt seemed to me that the desire to get married\u2014which, I regret to say, I believe is fundamental and primal in women\u2014is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal urge, which is to be single again.\u201d Maybe this is why the clinch appears only in the final minutes of Sleepless<\/em> and Mail<\/em>\u2014Ephron is in a mad dash against reality. Sleepless <\/em>ends<\/a> with Hanks and Ryan taking the elevator down from the top of the Empire State Building; you wonder what floor they\u2019re on when the swoon wears off.<\/p>\n Was Ephron\u2019s heart in these movies? As she saw it, she produced a frivolous body of work almost against her will. She did When Harry Met Sally <\/em>\u201cfor the money\u201d and agreed to rewrite Sleepless in Seattle<\/em> because \u201cI was looking for a cash infusion\u201d;\u00a0You\u2019ve Got Mail<\/em> was foisted on her by producer Lauren Schuler-Donner. In 2006, Ephron said that romantic comedies were \u201calmost all I\u2019ve been able to get made. I\u2019ve written other things, sad scripts that are on the shelf that are unbelievably serious, hard-hitting political things.\u201d\u00a0Seriousness is relative, of course. In 1961 her parents wrote Take Her, She\u2019s Mine<\/em>, a meandering, folksy Broadway play (later a Jimmy Stewart movie) that quoted liberally from Nora\u2019s letters home from Wellesley, and her relationship with \u201chard-hitting political things\u201d is already recognizable:<\/p>\n We just heard Norman Thomas speak on disarmament, which, naturally, he regards as absolutely necessary, and isn\u2019t the world situation abysmal? Sometimes I think it won\u2019t last another week, and here am I, still a virgin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Reflecting on this period, Ephron said, \u201cIt was as if I could not sustain a serious thought in my head for more than one sentence.\u201d I think that\u2019s what rankles critics\u2014the hectic inconsistency of her work. Even within a single movie, there are moments of rapturous sublimity and moments you feel like crossing the street to avoid.<\/p>\n I\u2019m wary of giving Ephron too much credit (this is the woman\u00a0who fell behind on the You\u2019ve Got Mail<\/em> sound mix because she became obsessed with Snood), but I suspect that the most insufferable bits of her movies represent Ephron\u2019s calculated stabs at populism, at connecting with a demographic of viewers with which she had no familiarity. Indeed, in its very calculation Ephron\u2019s work was tougher and nobler than anyone gave her credit for. Sure, You\u2019ve Got Mail<\/em> is full of cutesy excess and deploys \u201cOver the Rainbow\u201d about every fifteen minutes\u2014but has there ever been a romantic comedy so ardently filled with scenes of people reading, and writing, and reading aloud what they\u2019ve just written? In her last decade Ephron wrote Julie & Julia<\/em>; unproduced screenplays about journalist Marguerite Higgins, jazz singer Peggy Lee, and Daily News<\/em> columnist Mike McAlary; and Imaginary Friends<\/em>, a wonderful, brickabracky Broadway play about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. (Imaginary Friends <\/em>became a play when no studio would finance it; the same thing happened to the McAlary project, Lucky Guy<\/em>, which may reach Broadway next January with Tom Hanks in the lead.)<\/p>\n Ephron was trying to keep these twentieth-century Pecos Bills alive, even if it meant glossing over their bodies of work in favor of gossipy minutiae. Imaginary Friends<\/em>, for example, reduced the storied intellectual feud between Hellman and McCarthy to a catfight over \u201cthe same guy.\u201d Ephron saw that our culture had grown gimpy to the point that Lillian Hellman\u2019s body of work would be forgotten and she could only be kept alive via anecdote. In fact, Ephron saw this coming as far back as 1975, when she wrote a piece for Esquire<\/em> about the newly minted People<\/em> magazine. \u201cIt\u2019s almost not worth getting upset about,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s a potato chip. A snack. Empty calories.\u201d Then, in an endearingly ludicrous cross-cultural lunge, Ephron traced People<\/em>\u2019s origins to Kierkegaard, \u201cwho in 1846 said that in time, all anyone would be interested in was gossip \u2026 People<\/em> is the future, and it works, and that makes me grouchiest of all.\u201d<\/p>\n